“We’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” (US General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Commander of NATO)

Contemptuous of international law, the US makes no secret of its plots to overthrow the leaders of internationally recognized governments that reject the neoliberal New World Order.Iran is at the top of the US enemies list. The US has been at it since the 1979 Iran Revolution, when the Iranian people overthrew the US’s “our boy”, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Shah had become the US’s “our boy” as CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt referred to him in 1953, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower overthrew the popular democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Overthrowing governments isillegal according to US law and international law. It is also immoral if one believes in democracy, self-determination,and the sovereignty of nations, respect for human life, and the rule of law.

The Weaponization of Human Rights

The crushing economic sanctions now unilaterally imposed by the USon Iran are causing massive suffering and the deaths of thousands of Iranian civilians. The US response is glee that the sanctions are “working”. This is nothing short of barbaric siege warfare to starve the Iranians out. Under international law the Iran sanctions maybe illegal, since they are not authorized by the United Nations. The collective punishment of economic warfare is immoral, economic terrorism and a weapon of mass destruction. Secondary sanctions that impose sanctions on non-US and non-Iranian financial institutions that transact business with Iran amounts to blackmail, especially since it is the US that violated the Iran Nuclear Deal, and not Iran.

Weaponizing human rights is a most cynical tool of US imperialism, especially since the US has a very poor record on human rights at home. While holding itself out in biblical terms as a “city on a hill” (Matthew 5:14-16), the US is not a model of John Winthrop’s Christian Charity, as politicians such as Ronald Reagan have opined. The US is the only developed country that does not consider healthcare a universal human right, and it has been steadily cutting FDR’s New Deal social benefits, while the rich get richer from tax cuts. In 2008 the US bailed out the banks, while millions of homeowners lost their homes. Over 20% of US children live in poverty. Basic human services that are the responsibility of government have been turned into cash machines by privatizing.

George H. W. Bush’s New World Order neoliberals and neocons despiseany country that closes its doors to US corporate exploitation, and instead uses its own natural resources for the benefit of its own people. The US uses “human rights” to attack countries such as Venezuela, Libya, and Iran that consider economic freedom from need a human right.

One of the main reasons that Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani negotiated the Iran Nuclear Deal was so that the lifting of UN Security Council economic sanctions would give Iran the much needed ability to increase social spending for the Iranian people.Instead, the imposition of even harsher US unilateral sanctions by the Trump neocon stacked administration has dashed Rouhani’s hopes, and makes the economic situationdirer for the Iranian people. The nefarious purpose of sanctions is to make the Iranian people suffer so that they will become disgruntled and rebellious.

As Robert Fantina has written in Counterpunch, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy is intensively lobbying for the US to sanction Iran’s “The Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order” (EIKO). One of EIKO’s subsidiaries is the Barakat Foundation, which is a charitable foundation that is concerned with social programs for the people. The Ayatollah Khomeini has described it by saying,

“I’m concerned about solving problems of the deprived classes of the society. For instance, solve problems of 1000 villages completely. How good would it be if 1000 points of the country are solved or 1000 schools are built in the country.”…The Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order.

Targeting human rights organization to “promote human rights” is a cruel oxymoron. It is weaponizing human rights at its worst, and attacks the most vulnerable people in a society.

Liberals often consider economic sanctions an acceptable, even humane, alternative to force. Nothing could be further from the truth, and progressive people everywhere need to recognize it. Economic sanctions are violence. The Geneva Conventions recognize that siege warfare and collective punishment against civilians are war crimes. How could something that is illegal in wartime be legal in peacetime? The International Committee of the Red Cross has often raisedconcerns about economic sanctions, including UN authorized economic sanctions.

The United States of “Amnesia”

Gore Vidal was one of the great American intellectuals, writers, commentators and critics of US foreign policy, domestic politics and society. He coined aphrase to describe the US’s memory loss of inconvenient truths: “The United States of Amnesia”.Most Americans are illiterate about US history. They cannot even remember recent events that happened in theirlifetime. Today people barely remember what happened prior to the current 24 hour news cycle.

Now that the destruction of Iran is at the top of the to-do list, the people of the “United States of Amnesia”have forgotten all the countries that the US has destroyed in just the past quarter of a century. It has gone down the memory hole.Anything that happened in the 70’s, 80, and 90’s has been completely lost in the fog of amnesia.US victims are not so forgetful.

Afghanistan

The USis still deconstructingAfghanistan, after using it as a pawn in the Cold War. The evil masterminds of the invasion of Afghanistan in the late 1970’s were Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy “Mr. Human Rights” Carter. Together they snuffed out Afghanistan’s budding development and women’s emancipation, which was developing nicely under a communist government. Using Afghanistan’s development as a weapon, the US recruited the fanatical mujahideen to overthrow the communist government. Brzezinski and Carter where elated when the Soviets intervened to help their neighbor. It was Brzezinski’s plan, and the Afghan people, especially the women, paid the price.Millions of Afghans have died, and become widowed and orphaned, thanks to President Carter, and his successors.

In2001 Bush’sre-invasion of Afghanistan was planned by the neocons ofthe Project for a New American Century(PNAC) even before the attacks of September 11, 2001.The casus belli was oil and gas pipelines, and not terrorism. The Afghanistan Taliban government was toldthat they could either accept Union Oil of California’s proposed “peace” pipeline with a “carpet of gold”, or else the US would give them a “carpet of bombs”. Osama bin Laden was not a priority.

The Taliban had offered before and after 9/11 to present Osama bin Laden for trial, but the US rejected the offer. They had no evidence against him. Once the Taliban government was ousted, thenBush became bored with Afghanistan. According to Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan, and there are lots of good targets in Iraq”.

Iraq

Bombing a country because it “has good targets” is an obvious war crime, and those responsible for doing it are insane war criminals. The Bush administration lied the US into the Iraq War with lies that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear bomb program. The mainstream propaganda media spread the lie, and cheered for war as it always does. It did not make any difference that the UN weapons inspectors could find no nuclear weapons. Of course it is impossible to prove a negative, that is, that one has no nuclear weapons, which should be a lesson for Iran and North Korea about trusting a deal with the US.

After the US invaded Iraq in 2003, 1625 weapons inspectors spent 2 years and $1 billion trying unsuccessfully to find weapons of mass destruction. Still up to half of the American people still believe that Saddam Hussein had WMD’s, which goes to show how indelibly propaganda once learned sticks to the brain.

According to the IAEA and the US intelligence agencies, Iran has not had a nuclear program to develop nuclear weapons since 2003, but try convincing the mainstream media and the American people of that. It is another lesson for Iran and North Korea to remember.

Libya

Libya’s people used to enjoy a high standard of living with food, shelter, education, employment and healthcare considered a human right. Now Libya is destroyed and in chaos and it will never return to its previous prosperity. It is all because Obama lied that Muammar Al Gaddafi was committing genocide against Libya’s “Arab Spring” in 2011. We now know that there was no genocide. Obama lied the US into another war of aggression. Here is what he said on March 28, 2011:

“Of course, there is no question that Libya -– and the world –- would be better off with Qaddafi out of power. I, along with many other world leaders, have embraced that goal, and will actively pursue it through non-military means. But broadening our military mission to include regime change would be a mistake. The task that I assigned our forces –to protect the Libyan people from immediate danger and to establish a no-fly zone -– carries with it a U.N. mandate and international support.”

Of course it would be a “mistake” to broaden the military mission to a regime change, but that is what it was from the start. The alleged genocide was a lie being pushed by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, along with Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice and former United Nations Ambassador Samantha “R2P” Power.

Instead of being a no-fly zone, the Libya mission carried out over 5,800 bombing sorties and 309 cruise missiles strikes. That is not a no-fly zone. The US and its coalition were the airforce for terrorists bent on destroying Libya’s secular government.

Just like what would later happen in Syria, the “Arab Spring” that the US said it was protecting wereterrorists that belonged toAnsar al-Shariah, Abu Obayda bin al-Jarah Brigade, Malik Brigade and The 17 February Brigade, which are all al Qaeda-type terrorist groups. They are the ones that later had a dispute with the CIA, and attacked their outpost in Benghazi, killing US Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three CIA operatives, on September 11, 2012. What was the CIA doing in Benghazi, anyway?

Syria

Having turned the once prosperous Libya into a chaotic hell, the U.S. raided Qaddafi’s arsenal of weapons and sent them via a CIA rat line that went through Turkey, andon to the Syrian anti-Assad “rebels”.

Who are the so-called rebels in Syria? According to a Congressional Research report “Armed Conflict in Syria: Overview and U.S. Response” (July 15, 2015) there were an estimated 1,500 different rebel groups in Syria, with as estimated 115,000 members total. The report concedes that if the Assad regime should collapse it would likely lead to chaos with rebel forces fighting for control among themselves.

In other words, the Congressional Research Report is saying that Syria would become another Libya. The Bashar al-Assad government is one of the last secular governments in the Middle East. There are no democratic moderates waiting in the wings to govern Syria if Assad should fall.

Iran

As General Wesley Clark told us, the coming war with Iran is part of a single plot from the 1990’s by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). In the 1990’s President Bill Clinton cautiously embraced the neocon vision. Bush was fully on board with the PNAC philosophy, and in 2001 he filled his administration with its members, such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Regardless of the legality or not of economic sanctions, like those now being imposed by the US unilaterally on Iran, economic sanction are immoral weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton economic sanctions of the 1990’s killed over 500,000 Iraqi children. According to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, the Clinton administration thought it was “worth it”.

The U.S. is now killing hundreds of thousands of Iranian children for the same nefarious reason that Iraqi children died. The U.S. has unilaterally reimposed sanctions of mass destruction against Iran, after the U.N. had lifted sanctions with Security Council Resolution 2231 (2015).

The resolution endorsed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) (i.e. the Iran Nuclear Deal) of July 14, 2015. It was agreed to by all the permanent members of the UN Security Council: China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States; as well as the High Representative of the European Union, and the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The UN vote on the resolution was 15 to 0. Basically the Iran Deal was an agreement that Iran would restrict its nuclear enrichment program, allow the IAEA extensive inspections, and lift U.N. imposed economic sanctions.

While U.N. Security Council resolutions are binding on all member states, Resolution 2231 (2015) had enough loopholes that gave the U.S. technical grounds to virtually walk away from it. Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China and anyone else doing business with the U.S. should always remember that the UScan not be trusted to keep its word.

The US maintains that Iran has violated the spirit of the JCPOA on several grounds, although none of those issues were part of the JCPOA. According to the Trump administration the Iran Deal is “the worst deal ever” because it does not prevent Iran from testing ballistic missiles, supposedly Iran is the “number one” sponsor of state terrorism, and the UScomplains about Iran’salleged abuse of human rights. The real reason the US violated the Iran Nuclear Deal is that the US will be satisfied with nothing less than “taking out” Iran. That is what the US has wanted to do since 1979, even before PNAC came along.